Until now, ThreadX has been available only for 32-bit processors and DSPs. But through a cooperative effort with Microchip, Express Logic has created a brand-new version of ThreadX, called ThreadX MCU Edition (ThreadX/MCU) to support Microchip's PIC24 MCU and dsPIC DSC families. ThreadX/MCU is a fully upward-compatible, reduced-size, 16-bit edition of Express Logic's 32-bit ThreadX RTOS. ThreadX/MCU provides full preemptive scheduling, interrupt management, message passing, thread synchronization, resource locking, event management and timer control. It supports up to 10 threads, queues, timers, mutexes, event flag groups, block pools and byte pools.

Like ThreadX, ThreadX/MCU is royalty-free, making it suitable for high-volume applications in real-time motor control, speech/audio, and wireless networking targeted by Microchip's PIC24 MCUs and dsPIC DSCs. ThreadX/MCU is designed to reside in an extremely small memory footprint, as small as 1.6K bytes, and to deliver low-overhead operations that execute in only 50 - 150 clock cycles, leaving more CPU cycles for the application.

In addition to introducing ThreadX/MCU for Microchip's 16-bit controllers, Express Logic has also ported its NetX TCP/IP stack, FileX embedded file system, USBX USB host/device stack, and PEGX graphics development kit for use with ThreadX/MCU.

The ThreadX/MCU RTOS will be the second RTOS announced for MicroChip's PIC24 and DsPIC familes. On August 14th RoweBots Research launched DSPano version 2, an open source RTOS for the PIC24 and DsPIC devices.

Free demo licenses for ThreadX/MCU are available from Microchip or through the microchipDIRECT online storefront. Full production licenses of ThreadX/MCU, NetX/MCU, FileX/MCU and PEGX/MCU are available immediately through microchipDIRECT or Express Logic, with licenses beginning at $5,990.